Decisions, decisions. Goodness knows how difficult it can be to make a decision—especially when the choices are set out like so many juicy cherries, their taut skin barely able to contain all of the delicious fallacies percolating beneath the surface. But, really, some of these blogs have just been too long, so it is necessary to exercise discipline. This is especially urgent when considering the wit and wisdom of one of the nation’s premier fallacy factories, the Honorable Jason Chaffetz. In case you are not familiar with Representative Chaffetz, all you really need to know for the purposes of this lesson are the following three facts:

He has represented Utah’s third Congressional District since 2008;

He is the chair of the of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; and

Now, you might be wondering, after providing the platform for a witch hunt that arguably ultimately resulted in the non-election of perhaps the most qualified presidential candidate who ever walked the face of God’s green earth, however will Jason Chaffetz fill his newly cleared calendar? Well, there are many options out there, but I’ll tell you one thing that Chaffetz won’t be doing any time soon.

He won’t be investigating any of Trump’s possible problems with the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.[2]

Nope. Not a one.

Why ever not? I hear you cry. After all, isn’t the government oversight committee supposed to, well, oversee the government? And if the president is riddled with more potential conflicts of interests than a wharf rat has fleas, shouldn’t someone at least take a sneaky peek at what’s going on?

Well, apparently not. And why not? Well, on the 15th of January, Chaffetz explained his “reasoning” on This Week:

You see my dilemma, don’t you? I mean, here I have some of the most flagrant hypocrisy uttered in political discourse in the past week,[3] but at the same time, I also have a lovely example of a strawman. What’s a Critical Thinking Teacher to do?

Well, after weeping a bit at the thought of leaving that filet mignon of hypocrisy alone, I decided to go along with the straw man fallacy. Hypocrisy is just too easy, and there are far too many examples (and far too little time) for us to examine every example that comes our way, no matter how glorious it might be.[4] Straw man fallacies are a bit harder to understand, and since Chaffetz has given us a nice example to work with, it seems a bit churlish to let it go by unnoticed. So, let’s start, shall we?

First of all, what is a straw man fallacy? Well, I think that the good folks at nizkor.org do an excellent job of defining a straw man fallacy:

When I think of a straw man, I think of those World War I movies, where dashing young soldiers practice their bayonet skills by shoving the blade into bales of hay. It makes the whole idea of killing someone with a knife on a stick look wondrously simple. But when you get onto the battlefield, and you have to shove that sucker through bone and sinew, then you realize how false the straw man is. In an argument, when an opponent’s actual claim is thick with muscle, and one’s pitiful little bayonet of a refutation is too weak to penetrate it, it is very tempting to replace the target claim with a distantly related, but quite pathetic, pile of straw. You can then jab your rhetorical bayonet in it to your heart’s content, until all you’re left with is a pile of chaff.[5] Here’s an example:

A: We need to control the feral cat population in our neighborhood. This place is crawling with scrawny, scabby kittens.

B: You beast! You hate cats!

The straw man is B’s assertion that A hates cats. While it is possible that A does hate cats, there is insufficient evidence to support B’s assertion at this time. Instead, B has mischaracterized A’s desire to control feral cats as a desire to exterminate them. But the one does not equate to the other: there are a variety of means at hand to control feral cats that fall far short of introducing them en masse to their maker. However, the emotional appeal of the straw man is such that poor A is left to splutter out that he loves cats, wouldn’t dream of killing them, etc., etc., etc.—and in the meantime, no agreement is reached about what to do with the feline nurseries that have magically appeared throughout A’s once desirable neighborhood. And an effective straw man diverts all attention from the issue at hand—the hallmark of a logical fallacy.

So, there are a few straw men lurking around in Jason’s speechlet, but, for the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on only one. And here it is:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Five days from now, [Trump] will be the president of the United States. At that point, will you be requesting this information [about possible Emoluments Clause violations].

CHAFFETZ: No, not necessarily. Look, I’m not just going to go on these fishing expeditions. I didn’t do that with President Obama. We didn’t go through this with President Obama.

Now, it seems reasonable at first blush, doesn’t it? We didn’t go after President Obama, so why should we go after President Trump? Well, sure, except for one little thing: You didn’t go after President Obama because President Obama didn’t have any Emoluments clause issues, numb nuts!

So, now that you’re armed with this knowledge, what should you do? Well, straw men are tricky, because in the heat of the moment it’s easy to be thrown off course by the emotions that the straw man stirs up. You need to be able to respond quickly and coolly to the diversionary tactic. That’s the nature of reasoned debate: it requires a certain amount of cold-bloodedness in order to maintain logic. But you don’t want to alienate your audience by being a Spock-like slave to your rational side. Clothe your muscular and robust logical refutation with humor, for instance: “Is that a straw man in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” Or, right before eviscerating the idiocy that your counterpart has just uttered, openly acknowledge its emotional appeal: “Gosh, Mary, you sure know how to stir up a hornet’s nest with that last irrelevant remark!” Do what you must, but just do it, because now, more than ever, we are confronted by an army of straw men.

Now that you’re done with this article, it would be good practice to spot and analyze the other straw men in Chaffetz’s statement. I’ll give you a hint, too: just about every sentence Jase utters is home to a straw man.

[2] “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” (US Const. Article I, sec. 9, clause 8).

[4] But before continuing on, let’s just agree that Jason Chaffetz must have a huge and brassy pair on him if he’s saying that he would never go on a fishing hunt! As if. Whew! Well, that feels better.